Creating a VPN server on AWS using PiVPN

One of the streaming services I use called NowTV recently launched an Irish service alongside their UK service which I was using. The Irish service costs _double_ the cost in UK. They have also begun geoblocking all Irish users and also users of VPN Services like ExpressVPN and PrivateInternetAccess from using the UK service.

To get around this I decided to set up my own VPN server on AWS in their London datacenter to get around the geoblocking.

The easiest way I have found to set up a VPN server is to use PiVPN (http://www.pivpn.io/) which was designed for use on Raspberry Pi but can be installed on any Debian based machine.

There has been a few recent guides on how to install PiVPN but this one focusses on installing on AWS.

A prerequisite for this guide is that you have an AWS account. If this is your first time using AWS then you can avail of their free tier for the first year which means you could have the use of a reliable VPN server free for a whole year. You will also need an SSH keypair.